24

There has been a whirlwind of exciting news for Elburn in the past 24 hours. Roll the credits, please!

Yesterday afternoon, we received the official paperwork from the US Environmental Protection Agency that formalizes our $475,000 grant from Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. This is a big "chunk of change," and will greatly help us remove the trace levels of radium from our village water supply. We knew we had been offered the grant for some time now, but it is still exciting to actually have the formal grant documents in our hands.

Last night, Charlie Blood of B&B Development presented our planning commission with his concept designs to establish two new baseball and two new soccer fields in Elburn. They will be built on property donated to our village north of the Blackberry Creek elementary school. Work on the fields should begin as soon as the weather breaks this spring. The two baseball fields will be 10th and 11th shared fields in Elburn. I think that is quite an accomplishment for a small village with no park district.

Late last night, I received an e-mail from author Marilyn Robinson stating that Elburn's history book "The Sidewalks of Elburn" is written, paginated and ready to go to the printer. The book is going to run some 400 pages with 92 photographs. I understand that an absolute "treasure chest" of historic photos came from the Dave and Mary Campbell collection. I haven't seen the draft book yet, but I'm happy for Marilyn and excited to see this interesting project come to fruition. The only thing left to decide is how many books we want to order for the first printing.

Then this morning, I attended the ground breaking for the American Bank & Trust on Main Street. Bank President Harry Coin expects to have his bank finished this year, with substantial completion of the building scheduled by Elburn Days. And, as Dave Anderson reminded us, this is the first major construction in our downtown since the Legion Building was built in the "fifties." Wow! Those American Bank "people" had the shiniest shovels I'd ever seen at their ground breaking. This is going to be an awesome project to watch happen right in the heart of our community!

So, there's 24 hours in the life of Elburn. As fast as we're moving, maybe we could get Keifer Sutherland to do an episode with us.